Oracle Night

Several months into his recovery from a near-fatal illness, thirty-four-year-old novelist Sidney Orr enters a stationery shop in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn and buys a blue notebook. It is September 18, 1982, and for the next nine days Orr will live under the spell of this blank book, trapped inside a world of eerie premonitions and puzzling events that threaten to destroy his marriage and undermine his faith in reality.

Why does his wife suddenly break down in tears in the backseat of a taxi just hours after Sidney begins writing in the notebook? Why does M. R. Chang, the owner of the stationery shop, precipitously close his business the next day? What are the connections between a 1938 Warsaw telephone directory and a lost novel in which the hero can predict the future? At what point does animosity explode into violence? To what degree is forgiveness the ultimate expression of love?

Paul Auster's mesmerizing eleventh novel reads like an old-fashioned ghost story. But there are no ghosts in this book -- only flesh-and-blood human beings, wandering through the haunted realms of everyday life. At once a meditation on the nature of time and a journey through the labyrinth of one man's imagination, Oracle Night is a narrative tour de force that confirms Auster's reputation as one of the boldest, most original writers at work in America today.

Paul Auster was born to Jewish middle class parents by the name of Samuel and Queenie. After graduating from Columbia University in 1970, he moved to France where he lived translating for French writers. Sincе he returned to America in 1974, he has published his own poems, essays, novels and translations of French writers such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Joseph Joubert.

He married his second wife, writer Siri Hustvedt, in 1981. Previously, Auster was married to the acclaimed writer Lydia Davis. He is a father of two children - Daniel and Sophie.

Paul Auster is known as the most unorthodox and philosophical writer of crime fiction. His work can be best described as a fusion of existential theories, absurdism and criminal plots – his characters are usually people on the verge of society, complete outsiders, who try to start life from zero and reinvent the conditions under which the human situation revolves. The collection of detective stories “The New York Trilogy” brought him to international success, mesmerizing the audience with its fathomless quest for identity and meaning beyond the surface of our well-ordered and sterile modern lives. Paul Auster has been awarded the France Culture Prize for Foreign Literature in 1989 and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1991. His postmodern twist of genres and themes has made it possible for the crime fiction to enter the reserved realm of serious literature. Paul Auster is also the Vice-President of PEN American Center.